Myriant files $125M IPO; 8th industrial biotech company to file in past year

Succinic acid pioneer becomes 8th industrial biotech company to file – first renewable chemicals pure-play.

In Massachusetts, Myriant filed for a $125 million IPO, becoming the 8th company in industrial biotechnology to file in the past 18 months. The filing is the first since Solazyme raked in a record $227 million (assuming sale of its overallotments) in its IPO last week. Solazyme stock, meanwhile, has jumed 24 percent in the first two days of trading on NASDAQ. All of the shares of common stock to be sold in the proposed offering would be sold by Myriant.

UBS Securities LLC, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and Piper Jaffray & Co. will be acting as joint bookrunning managers, with Morgan Joseph TriArtisan LLC acting as co-manager, for the offering.

The Myriant filing follows successful IPOs by Codexis, Amyris, Gevo and Solazyme in recent months. KiOR, Ceres and PetroAlgae have also filed registration papers with the SEC.

Myriant background

In January, Myrant announced the closing of a $60 million strategic equity investment from PTT Chemical Group, Thailand’s largest petrochemical producer.  Myriant said at the time that it would use the investment to help fund the rapid commercialization of its succinic acid platform, including construction of a succinic acid plant in Lake Providence, Louisiana.  The investment includes the establishment of a joint venture between PTT Chemical and Myriant for deploying Myriant’s technology in Southeast Asia.

In February, Myriant and Davy Process Technology signed a MOU covering the use of succinic acid as a bio-derived feedstock for the production of butanediol, tetrahydrofuran and gamma-butyrolactone. The MoU covers two areas of co-operation between Myriant and Davy, first the non-exclusive testing and approval of Myriant’s product succinic acid as a feedstock to the Davy process and second an exclusive Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with the purpose of integrating the technologies.

The Digest will publish its “Myriant: The complete IPO Analysis” later this week.